Last and slowest
At the glacial pace the country’s COVID-19 vaccination program is progressing, Filipinos may as well say goodbye to hopes that herd immunity will be achieved by the end of the year, and with it the lifting of the painful lockdowns that have bludgeoned the economy, shuttered businesses, and rendered millions jobless.
Indeed, if the vaccine rollout will remain at the current rate, it will take nine long years before the minimum 70 percent of the population will be vaccinated.
According to the Department of Health (DOH) and the National Task Force Against COVID-19 (NTF), 508,332 individuals had been vaccinated as of March 23, a utilization rate of just 45.16 percent of the available 1.125 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines — 525,600 doses of AstraZeneca vaccines under the Covax facility and another 600,000 Sinovac vaccine doses donated by China. More worryingly, that translates to a vaccination rate of only 22,101 individuals a day since the country’s vaccination program kicked off on March 1, putting the Duterte administration years away from its avowed herd immunity target.
Vice President Leni Robredo did the math: To achieve herd immunity, some 73.5 million Filipinos will have to get the jabs. With just 286 days left in 2021 (as of March 21), that will mean vaccinating 256,993 individuals a day. Unfortunately, there are hardly any signs that the vaccination program will be soon ramped up dramatically to achieve that minimum target, amid the surging cases and the increasing presence of new COVID-19 variants that may render the current vaccines ineffective. As it is, the administration could not even deploy quickly enough the vaccines that are already in the country. “’Yung konting supply na dumating sa atin, hindi pa natin ma-deploy with speed and dispatch. Let us assess where the bottlenecks are. [One million] pa lang supply natin, pero in 17 days hindi pa nga tayo naka-50-percent utilization, papaano na kung [70 million] na ’yung available?,” Robredo asked.
That admonition is sensible and on-point, but lamentably, it is once again bound to fall on deaf ears, because Robredo is anathema to an administration allergic to anything not coming from within its own circle—“the best talents and minds that we have in the entire government machinery,” as Palace mouthpiece Harry Roque crowed.
One of those “best and brightest,” Health Secretary Francisco Duque III, was seen responding to the surge in daily cases to over 7,000 last week with a fatuous PR stunt: going out in the streets brandishing a wooden stick to enforce physical distancing and distributing face masks and face shields, a gesture he regurgitated from the early days of the pandemic that now felt thoroughly clueless with the urgent shift in public clamor to the prompt distribution of vaccines. The country’s top health expert is still stuck at waving about his meter stick at a time when other countries are well on their way to inoculating their mass population. The Philippines was the last in Southeast Asia to kick off its vaccination campaign despite having the second highest number of COVID-19 cases, behind Indonesia.
On the ground, the mess and disorganization manifest in the detestable practice by some local government officials to flex their privilege by getting themselves vaccinated ahead of frontliners, in clear violation of the government’s own priority list. The World Health Organization has warned that countries may lose access to the Covax vaccine-sharing facility if the limited jabs are not given to the agreed-upon priority groups, led by health care workers.
The Philippine Chamber of Commerce and Industry last week urged the government to let the private sector buy their own vaccines freely, “without restrictions or conditions so we could move quickly and efficiently in vaccinating more people,” said PCCI President Benedicto Yujuico. “We cannot risk being left behind again and revert to being the ‘basket case’ of Asia.”
The Vaccination Program Act of 2021 signed last month provides that private firms can only purchase vaccines for their own use through a tripartite agreement with the DOH and NTF. As if that hurdle were not enough, senators got wind of a draft memo from the DOH and NTF that seeks to block some of the country’s largest companies involved in tobacco, milk, sugar, soft drinks, and alcohol from importing the vaccines, on grounds that the vaccination program could be used as an excuse to promote their products. Albay Rep. Joey Salceda decried it as one more unnecessary roadblock: “Every rule they are introducing on top of all the others seems to just complicate our response without getting anything meaningful against COVID-19 done.”
At this late, make-or-break stage in the game, that assessment also sums up the slapdash efforts of the administration so far, which means even more pain ahead well over a year into the pandemic.
